“I will, since it will irk the Blue Men. But your plan assumes there will be someone to answer your distress call.”

Menelaus said, “I don’t think this world is empty.”

“This part of it is. This air does not smell like there is an industrial civilization anywhere nearby. Even in my day, when everything was part of a worldwide forest, we still burned coal and oil, and you could smell it on the wind.”

“Speaking of something you can smell out for me, where is the radio tower in the airfield sending its information? You hinted that you could detect it.”

“Why should I tell you?”

“For one thing, you gave it away to the Blue Men when you blew the circuits out of their lie detector. It kind of peeved me, since you had been careful enough to keep it secret before that.”

“My secret, not yours.”

“Ours, like it or not,” Menelaus said. “We just stood here and counted up every fighting man in the camp. Do you think the Chimera plan of rushing the wire has a chance? If not, we go with my plan. Are you in or out?”

“In what?”

“In my circle of friends. If you are, answer the question.”

Soorm was silent, peering very closely at his face, first with the goat eye, then with the cuttlefish eye. He put his face within kissing distance of Menelaus and sniffed carefully, and then bent to sniff his armpits and crotch and tasted the air with his two tongues.

Menelaus endured this indignity without uttering one of the several snide comments that bubbled up inside him.

Finally Soorm straightened. “There is a distant responder signal the radio tower seeks out and answers. I was able to sense it now and again, and when I have wandered to various parts of the camp to triangulate. The source is seventeen hundred and thirty miles almost directly southeast of here.”

Menelaus knew where that was. One advantage of his extra brain capacity was that he could memorize reams of useless data, including almanacs and atlases, and make three- and four-dimensional models of them in his head.

“That could place it around Saint Christopher’s Island, one of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles,” said Montrose. “Mentor Ull, the older one, mentioned Mount Misery. I am assuming Mount Nevis and Montferrat are also active. Mount Nevis is across the narrows atop an island called Nuestra Siñora de las Nieves, ‘Our Lady of the Snows.’”

Soorm looked at him oddly. “Why do you assume volcanoes over a thousand miles away are active?”

“Because I set in motion certain plate tectonics to activate them, using self-replicating Von Neumann crystals. My intent is to end the ice age and reestablish a surface human civilization powerful enough to resist the Hyades before the End of Days. It is only half a millennium from now, so time is really limited.”

Soorm’s nape hairs bristled, and porcupine quills stood up from his scalp and shoulders. His scorpion tail lashed, and the swim flukes opened and shut nervously. “Who are—what are you?”

Menelaus relaxed and allowed the natural neural rhythm in his optic nerve to reassert itself. His gaze took on a magnetic majesty, an unearthly intelligence, a penetrating menace: Soorm tried to meet that gaze. But then Soorm stepped back and raised his scaly hand before his face.

3. Cards on the Table

Menelaus lowered the vividness of his face and features back to the normal human range, and he said, “You tried to protect me from the Blue Men. You did not know I was standing in the room, but you did try to discourage them from continuing to dig for me. You lied and said you thought I was a myth. I am grateful, but also curious. Why did you do that?”

“You cannot figure it out with your superhuman brain?” Soorm snarled.

“I can’t figure out jack with no information, no.”

“Why not? You are like a man walking among brute wolves to us.”

“A man raised by wolves, you mean. One with no humans to teach me their wonderful inventions, like language and arithmetic and logic and flint-napping: an illiterate Romulus who barks like a wolf, or Tarzan who never found that children’s primer to teach himself French.”

“I don’t know who those people are.”

“Too bad! And here I took the trouble to manipulate history to increase the longevity of certain stories I liked, and I established statistical incentives, introduced self-replicating sociometric viruses, and everything. Damn that Blackie and his meddling! In any case, my point is that a human baby raised by apes is a pretty smart ape but a pretty poor man. I don’t expect you to be in awe of me. But I didn’t expect you to help me, either. Why did you?”

“You tell me first why you are not afraid of me, if you are such a poor superman. Just because you are posthuman does not give you any supernatural powers. You could not live if I tore out your throat. You cannot fling beams of deadly energy from your brain.”

“No, but I can use my brain for thinking. I know that you are not Soorm scion Asvid.”

“Am I not? Then who am I?”

“A showdog for Reyes. For that matter, you are not even really a Hormagaunt.”

“Am I not? Then what am I?”

“A Nymph. Logically, if you are the first Hormagaunt, you must be the last Nymph. You alone of Hormagaunts, the eldest and first, do not kill for sadistic pleasure, nor for the gluttony to achieve more life. You don’t need to. Reyes y Pastor had to keep you alive as a propaganda tool, to prove that the longevity of the Hermeticists could and would continue to operate, even after centuries had passed. Starting with you, Reyes shared one of the primary secrets the Hermeticists learned via the Monument—the secret of Eternal Youth. You are far too old and cunning to kill without reason. And, unlike a real Hormagaunt, you have a certain degree of fellow-feeling, brother-love, pity for the weak. You did not use the Wintermind technique to obviate the basic emotional contour of your human nature. You used it to break the addictions the Nymph Queens used to redact your memory, mesmerize, enchant, and enslave you. You were the first to break free of the addictive system. Your name is not Soorm.”

“Is it not? What is my name?”

“Your real name is Asvid.”

Soorm shrugged. “Two right guesses out of three is not bad.”

“Your name really is Soorm?”

“Not quite. Actually, my real name is Marsyas, and my displayed design is Saffron and Oakwhite together, but my intimate is Oleander, Rocket and Mandrake twinned in a knot.”

Menelaus nodded. The Nymph naming scheme recited the heraldic flowers which identified which of several endocrinal protocols and glandular systems one used.

Soorm, or Marsyas, continued, “I am of the Tityroi, a flute-player for the Nymphs. I survived the torture pits and gladiatorial chambers of Reyes and became his champion. And then I outlasted and outlived his other champions. Asvid is a title, not a name. It means ‘the Old Man.’”

“It also means First of the Kindred. So I told you why I was not afraid,” said Menelaus, spreading his hands. “I had too much faith in your humanity. Why did you try to help hide the Judge of Ages?”

“Because none other can stop the Red Hermeticist.”

Menelaus cocked his head to one side. “Is he still alive?”

“Expastor lives. His Ghost lives. They are Dreagh, Ghosts who can possess living flesh.”

“Where?”

Soorm raised a webbed claw and pointed upward. “In my era, there was an evening star, an artificial moon. At sea, out from beneath the canopy of the world-forest, on clear nights, I could spy her rising and setting, a small, fine, silver point of light. You know whereof I speak?”

“The Nigh-to-Motionless starship Emancipation. Know of her? I built her. Blackie snitched her from me. Payback for snitching his bride from him, I suppose.”

Soorm said, “How do you know I will not betray you?”